Review: Bryan Cranston Is 'Mad As Hell' in 'Network,' But Do We Care?

Even if you haven't seen the landmark 1976 film "Network," you've likely heard a famous line from this scene:

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," says Howard Beale, a Walter Cronkite-type anchorman who falls apart on air after being told his ratings are so low that he's going to be fired. He threatens to commit suicide on the evening news and his ratings skyrocket. So young executive Diana Christensen keeps him on the air, even though he starts saying crazier and crazier things. 

Film critics at the time said the movie was "outrageously provocative," but now, this kind of opinionated newscasting is everywhere, from Rachel Maddow on the left to Sean Hannity on the right. Because of that, Ivo van Hove's production doesn't have much to say, though it's exciting to look at: It shows us the behind-the-scenes madness of a live TV show, with a bustling crew fixing makeup and lights at the last minute, producers barking orders from the glassed-in control room on the side, and technicians swirling cameras across the set and projecting the actors' faces on a giant screen. Bryan Cranston, as Beale, is the ideal actor for this dual role, simultaneously playing to the live audience (which includes people having dinner on the right hand side of the stage) and to the camera. His descent is rapid, explosive and transfixing — it's tough to look away.

Van Hove used projected live video to great effect in last summer's Holocaust drama "The Damned" at Park Avenue Armory. There, it allowed us intimacy and a kind of horrific empathy with Nazi sympathizers and others who were facing their own deaths. But here, it is just chilly and distancing. Cranston's performance may be pitch-perfect performance, but his Howard Beale is still a cipher. He's basically a metaphor for the way decency, authority and truth are corrupted by money, fame, and a drive for ratings. Van Hove has a gift for creating sympathetic portraits of monsters (we also saw this in his Broadway productions of "View From the Bridge" and "The Crucible") but that talent is absent in "Network." Beale isn't someone we ever come to care about, and, unfortunately, that extends to all of the characters in the play.

A secondary story, about Beale's best friend, the married producer Max Schumacher (Tony Goldwyn), and his affair with a career-obsessed executive played by Tatiana Maslany, is dull and simply puzzling, though perhaps it's just part of the overall moral decay that happens when people turn from seeking truth and toward inculcating populist rage. 

There are obvious parallels to our current media and politics in "Network," but van Hove ends with newscaster Beale delivering a monologue about the destructive power of absolute beliefs and then a montage of presidential inaugurations from Gerald Ford on. This ending explicitly panders to an anti-Trump crowd (indeed, on the night I attended, the Belasco echoed with boos when a clip appeared of the President taking the oath of office). It's an especially disappointing way to end, because it doesn't trust the audience to see what's right in front of their faces. 

"Network" by Lee Hall, based on a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Ivo van Hove. At the Belasco Theatre in an open run.